Lord of the Flies
devolution
In the last five years, 557 people were slain on the city’s streets, making Oakland the state’s second-most murderous city, behind Compton.
...There are entire blocks without a single two-parent family, where drug dealers have become the predominant male role models, and children fend for themselves in crowded, chaotic homes where they are routinely exposed to drugs, sex and guns.
...There are more and more families where there’s less and less structure,” [ Sgt. Tim Nolan, who has been investigating Oakland homicides for 17 years] said. “Talking to these suspects day in and out, there’s a higher percentage today with no sense of right and wrong. It’s frightening, but we are creating super-criminals.”
..."Many people who live there rarely leave Oakland, let alone their block, so their disputes take on epic proportions,” said Nolan.
Witnesses are cowed into silence because snitches have been known to disappear. Nearly half of all murders in Oakland go uncharged for lack of a willing witness, so a shooter knows he has about a 50-50 chance of getting away with it.
...Many of the convicted killers were quasi-homeless in grade school, moving every 90 days on eviction cycles, or bouncing between friends’ and relatives’ homes, where they slept on recliners and couches and floors.
...
Inside the home is pure chaos. Typically, they live with a third-generation relative, an elderly grandmother or aunt, who also opens her home to several other wayward relatives. They all pile into one home, bringing their boyfriends and girlfriends and their children. There’s no particular person in charge, no house rules, and people come and go.Often it’s in these houses where young boys first learn how to hold a gun, how to break a rock of cocaine into dime and nickel bags for sale.
Without parents to help them mature, the mental world of these young killers stays stuck in an infantile, egotistic state, said forensic psychologist Shawn Johnston, who has conducted more than 15,000 court evaluations of adult and juvenile criminals in 15 Northern California counties.
“What keeps us from killing each other is empathy, and we learn it from bonding with parents who pick us back up when we get hurt or teased as children,” Johnston said. “Without it, you get guys who live in a constant state of protecting the fantasy that they are the most important thing this side of the Milky Way. And because they don’t have empathy, they will shoot or stab to protect their illusion."
Breakdown of the family, breakdown of a moral structure - we could say that it all began with a liberal agenda a few decades ago. The attack on the family started with Gramsci, the Italian Comunist and Marxist. The welfare state began probably with FDR, but it continues.
Oakland (among others) is a perfect example of what happens when we lost the idea of Family, and when we depend on the welfare state.Posted by ZZMike on 12/11/07 at 08:50 AM
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